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Time to play “Name that Politician.” I’ll use present tense
and American lingo although the politician may be modern or historical,
American or British.

1.He is notorious or famous for his uncompromising
positions on his pet projects which are considered outrageous and outlandish by
a great many people.

2.He changed parties at least once and was often
seen in the company of the political enemy.

3.While in his job (be it political or private) he
often used patronage (securing jobs for friends of friends) for getting
projects through.

4.His marital life was often a target of his
political enemies.

5.Detractors often pointed to his many failures.

6.He was criticized by many for being opposed to
the major war of his time when he ran for president.

7.When he ran for president, he was not popular
among large groups of people.

8.When campaigning he often fought back
politically by pitting his opponents against each other by carefully planned
political patronage and by appealing to the people with his powers of oratory.

9.His bedrock principles were noted as
nationalism, and republicanism.

10.He was known as a talker. He could talk for
hours and often did.

Not sure who you were thinking about, but, if you said
Winston Churchill, you could mostly be right although I’ve never quite associated
his philosophies with republicanism and have never read any criticism of his
wife, Clementine or Clemmie as he called her. But he failed often in politics,
changed parties several times, levied criticism against the bunglings of WWI
and most of the other points.

But all ten certainly applied to the 16th
President of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln. And I chose to
write briefly about him because it’s a beautiful spring day and I’m gazing out
at our lilac bush that’s about to bloom. The frost has spared the blossoms and
soon it will spring forth in all its beauty. For most, that is an amazing
occasion, but, for me it is a rather melancholy time for it brings to my mind
these lines from Walt Whitman:

When lilacs last in the
dooryard bloom’d,

And the great star early
droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d, and yet shall
mourn with ever-returning spring.

He wrote these as the opening lines to his elegy for the
funeral of Abraham Lincoln, for it was on a spring day like today in 1865 that
Lincoln succumbed to the effects of the shot from JW Booth the night before.
April 15, 1865 to be exact.

It would be well for all to remember during this primary
election season to temper our enthusiasm for our candidates and antipathy for
those we oppose. Booth’s ember of political hatred once enflamed led to death
of a great leader.

Taking
Donald Trump to task is too easy. No one has ever blown himself up to be larger
not only than life, but than a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Snoopy Balloon. He knows
the pot shots are coming but only inflates himself more, caring less for the
incoming fire.

Nowhere does
he get more incoming righteous indignation fire than from Utahns seething with
wrath for his Gadianton visage, lack of Cleon Skousen upbringing and the
missing Ezra Taft Benson sensibilities for the Constitution. Many that I meet
insist Trump is not a Republican, neither a consistent conservative nor even a
conservative, and so forth. Others just say he is evil…pure evil, although I’ve
never understood that oxymoron.

I’ve had
plenty of Romney clones assure me Trump is a phony and his billions of dollars
aren’t real. That Trump’s business failings, unlike Romney’s, were big deals,
but their sources are always “a friend of a friend told me and he knows.”

I assure
them that like Marc Antony, this Mark has not come to praise Caesar but to bury
him. Or at least understand him – and like Opie told Sheriff Andy, “Let’s give
him a fair trial and then hang him.”

To that end
I’ve gathered my wheel barrows of research collected not only from when the
Donald first announced he was running , but in the mid 1980’s when I first saw
him in New York City and read his light weight book, The Art of the Deal. My
business associate at the time, Byron Boothe, assured me he didn’t think much
of the flamboyant millionaire because he had dinner in Trump’s group and Donald
had a drink… with an umbrella in it. What kind of a hard driving real estate
mogul drinks Shirley Temple’s, Byron insisted. Turns out Donald is a teetotaler
and doesn’t care if anyone likes it or not. Pretty much the way he does
everything.

Back to a
year ago. When my brother called me from California to let me know he’d heard
Trump had thrown his hair into the ring to run for the presidency I asked for
which party. I half expected he’d gone back to the Reform Party of Ross Perot.
But, no, he declared he was now a Republican all the way. Unless they weren’t
nice to him. I told my brother I wouldn’t hold my breath. Give Donald a week or
two to self-destruct with several off-message comments that would sink his
tenuous ship.

In the
months since then Trump has scored more off-message comments than I can count
and they’ve driven his media coverage through the roof along with his
negatives. In my previous life as a political hack in D.C., the president of
our grassroots citizen’s lobby, Neal B. Blair used to preach that if you can
drive the opponents negatives high enough, he could never recover.

Well, Trump
has gleefully collected the negative rule books and a bunch of other campaign
conventional wisdom rule books and burned them on his way to a commanding lead
and the probable nomination of the Republican Party. And, yes, my friends in
Utah, he actually is a Republican according to all of the ballots and
Republican Party records.

One high
ranking Republican friend at the Utah Republican Convention I attended confided
in me that his daughter had been doing research on Hitler’s rise to power and
he thought it scary how many similarities there were with Trump’s rise. I
yawned and suggested about 10 points where Winston Churchill’s rise was also
similar. He paused to give that some
thought, and then concluded that powerful people do tend to have much in common
with their accumulations of power – both those who do it legitimately and those
who don’t. In fact, Ted Cruz’s methods of scoring delegates is actually more
comparable to some of Hitler’s tactics than Churchill or Trump’s methods of
populism. At least Hitler started a party and kept to it while both Churchill
and Trump changed parties. (Knowing history is a bummer.)

My friend
asked why I supported Trump and I said, “whoa, cowboy. The election isn’t
today. I have no vote until November. I support no one. I’m in a state of
gathering information. Pondering.” So he asked me, “What is good about Donald
Trump?”

I suggested
that the first clue to that answer is that if you have to ask that question it
might be that your personal prejudices are so high that you’re blind to the
obvious strong points. I asked him, “Why do you think so many otherwise
intelligent people like Dr. Ben Carson, Phyllis Schlafly, Geraldo Rivera, Rudy
Gulliani, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Newt Gingrich, Lou Dobbs, Ann Coulter, Bill
O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh have good things to about Donald
Trump? (Not that they’ve all endorsed him, but they do say many good things
about him.) Why does his ex-wife who he admits he severely wronged, stand up
for him so strongly and promote him as a presidential candidate?”

He thought
about it. “Those aren’t stupid people. I think it’s his innate or perhaps
developed sense of leadership in getting something done. He has gotten things
done and in a government that’s in gridlock; in Washington D.C. where we’ve
both worked and nothing works, our fellow citizens are sick to death of
politicians who can’t get anything to work.”

I agreed.
Despite Mitt Romney’s protestations about Trump being a phony, Trump has
actually accomplished quite a lot. Just look at the heaps of criticism about
all of the buildings with his name plastered on the top – Trump. He’s got an
edifice naming complex for sure. But, they’re on buildings he’s built. When’s
the last time you built a building. As a former general contractor, I have
respect for anyone who even dabbles in building. It takes a considerable amount
of coordinating leadership to pull together the subcontractors, inspectors,
materials and testing to put even a small house together. Try doing it for a
skyscraper in Manhattan. Trump has accomplished more in business than Mitt
Romney, and Mitt has an impressive resume.

Like any
business person, Trump has made mistakes – some whoppers in fact. So did
Romney. Our country was founded on people who were unafraid to make whoppers.
Big deal. Some of Trump’s businesses were either ugly, shady or awful. I have
no interest in dealing in gambling or strip joints. For him it was just another
business. Voters will have to weigh the evidence and compare those legal but
unsavory businesses with the way Hillary Clinton conducted the seamy quid pro
quo and crony capitalism of the Clinton Foundation. I suspect that will end up
a wash with neither side getting clean.

My friend
asked about Trump’s divorces. Yep, he’s had them. Of course Kasich had one and
Trump had two. Not sure if we’re supposed to keep score. Some insist Donald’s
penchant for marrying beautiful eastern European models is a disqualifying
trait. I’d rather not get into the peccadillos of past presidents. It broke my
heart when I found out Ike stepped out on Mamie Eisenhower, but then again, she
was no pin up model so does that factor back into the equation or should we
just stop this sort of questioning? Unless we bring up Marilyn and Jackie and
JFK. Aww. I give! Monica beat them all and Hillary enabled.

In the end,
we both decided if Trump were to be the Republican nominee, the best advice is
to study up on him without all of the knee-jerk reactions and try to sift
through his character and issues. Ignore his smoke screens and lack of
political sophistication in giving well thought out political double
speech…something we both agreed was at least refreshing.

We listed a
few thinks we both like about Trump:

1.He is a generalist. No, he doesn’t have well
thought out policy answers. For those stultifying policy discussions we’d have
to go to Hillary to bore us. Trump lays out vision. That’s what leaders and
generals do. They hire colonels to create the deals, and lieutenants and
sergeants to carry out the plan. And Trump does have his vision. Specifically
he says he wants to:

a.Stop illegal immigration.

b.Promote proper immigration and streamline it.

c.Eliminate huge trade imbalances.

d.Make better trade deals

e.Encourage our businesses to stay here.

f.Have an incentive tax system to encourages our
businesses to invest here and bring their money parked overseas back to the
USA.

g.Protect the 2nd Amendment.

h.Protect the unborn except in the case of rape,
incest or the life of the mother.

i.Repeal Obamacare. We did wonder what Trump meant
by his thoughts that he couldn’t let a poor person die in the streets because
he had no insurance. Again, a generalist comment. His references to that have
to do with putting it back to the states to figure out. He does seem to like
Federalist solutions – let the States decide.

2.He is learning and is starting to pivot to a
less amateurish persona.

3.He says he’s going to produce a list of
conservative judges he would nominate to SCOTUS who will be strict
constitutionalists. Smart move if he follows the list.

4.His family. Anybody with an impressive family of
five kids can’t be all bad. I believe someone once stated something about “by
their fruits you’ll know them.”

7.We saw nothing racist or anti-woman about him.
Let’s start with racist. Yes, he speaks ill of illegal Mexican
immigrants, but, Mexico is a country, not a race. On Muslims he suggested a
temporary halt until our documentation process could be verified and other generalizations
but to the obvious point, Islam is a religion, not a race. So, where are the
racism objections?

Now the anti-women charge. It’s obvious from his business dealings that
he employs and promotes freely men and women of any and every race. He sees
green first. At least so far as the evidence is concerned. True, he’s made
terrible comments about a handicapped person and about Rosie O’Donnell and some
other individual women. That makes him a jerk, not a racist, bigot or other
“ists.” He seems to be an equal opportunity offender at times, and a charmer at
others. Don’t know how he’ll change in the Oval Office. Could be a problem if
he gives Angela Merkel a wedgie or tries to high five the Pope.

8.We believe him when he says he abhors abortion
now and has a pro-life conversion. We believe him as much as we do Romney in
his change in abortion stances.

9.He’s loyal and sticks by his people. Cruz, Kasich, the media, Clinton, Sanders all
said Trump should have fired his campaign manager for grabbing that female
reporter but Trump stood by his guy and now the facts prove Trump right and the
rest as reactionaries.

10.He is or can be an SOB. But, as FDR said about
George Patton, “yes, he’s an SOB but he’s our SOB and is going to kick the butt
of their SOB.”

We’re not
about to coronate him, not by half, but at least he’s not Satan and deserves a
fair hearing before we string him up at the Convention. We mostly found his
greatest positive is… he isn’t Hillary Clinton.

Christ Visiting Ancient Russians

Imagine my surprise to find this Nesterov painting from about 1900 on a phonograph record celebrating 1,000 years of baptism in Russia. To receive a free hi-def version, please email mark@mjstoddard.com and subject line Russian Painting.